"The prospect, therefore, was rather chilly. I had left my home of many years in the city of Baltimore, where I received all the education that ever was bestowed upon me, and where I sat at the feet of that Gamaliel, the Reverend John Mason Duncan, to whom under God, I am indebted, entirely by His grace, for the position I occupy to-day. My heart had been much interested in religious matters for two or three years before I left Baltimore. There were five or six of us young men, as students of Mr. Duncan, and we had organized some meetings through the city of Baltimore, and God was with us; and the warm heart—if I had any warm heart at all—that I brought to Philadelphia, was kindled at the altar of those dear young brethren. How much we are indebted to God for young men! How much, my brethren, are the eldership, are you, am I, indebted to young men!" Dr. Chambers's last words in this paragraph are especially appropriate, because it is the tendency of most theologians and elderly men to teach that God was, not that he is. With young men, God's existence is more likely to be in the present tense.
The ecclesiastical orphan, thus cast fatherless and friendless upon the wide world, began to inquire whither he should go to seek ordination. Happily there were other bodies of Christians and a living church of Christ, besides the one which had withheld its blessing. Happily too, there were men in the Presbyterian Churches of Philadelphia, warm friends, who were able to direct him wisely, one of them being the large-hearted scholar, James Patriot Wilson, D.D., pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, predecessor of Albert Barnes, and then fifty-six years old. The other was Rev. Thomas Harvey Skinner, D.D., pastor of the Fifth Presbyterian Church in Locust street, and who, twenty-six years afterwards, became the famous professor in Union Theological Seminary of New York City. Both of these men were in hearty sympathy with those views of truth afterwards called the "New School". These brethren with Dr. Duncan, advised Mr. Chambers to go into Yankee land and there be ordained by Congregational clergymen. They gave him letters of introduction to the Rev. Nathaniel W. Taylor, the famous exponent of "the new divinity" and then of the theological department of Yale College.
It was not Presbyterianism only that was at this era being rocked on the waves of progress by the gales of the Spirit. About this time, or shortly afterwards, Connecticut Congregationalism was being excited and lifted out of torpor and routine by the breezy discussions of "Taylorism" and "Tylerism". The former expressed the views of Dr. Nathaniel William Taylor, the successor of Moses Stuart, and then holding the Dwight professorship in the Theological Department of Yale College. The young seminary opened in 1822 was therefore but three years old when Mr. Chambers appeared to be ordained. Whatever may be the true label we put upon Dr. N. W. Taylor, he was one of the greatest of America's theologians when the appeal was being taken from Calvin to Christ. He taught a modification of Hopkinsism which many Presbyterians regarded as hostile to Calvinism and many New Englanders as "unsound". As Mr. Chambers had already done, Dr. Taylor repudiated the words "predestinate" and "decreed" and used the word "purposed" concerning God's desire to save men. Before he died, in 1858, he had trained over seven hundred ministers. Ex-President Dwight, in his recent book on Men and Memories of Yale, presents him felicitously in word and picture.
About the time also of rising "Taylorism" the new methods of preaching and revival used by Rev. C. G. Finney, afterwards president of Oberlin College, excited much alarm among the men of the old school. How strange are the variations and how curious is the progress of orthodoxy! Most of the great revivalists of this country were nourished in the Congregational churches; and, from Finney to Moody, they were at first looked upon with suspicion. Later they were welcomed and lauded as the saviors of orthodoxy. Verily the "earthen vessel" is sometimes more in evidence than the "heavenly treasure".
To combat the views of Dr. Taylor, Dr. Bennett Tyler, ex-president of Dartmouth College, and then pastor at Portland, Me., was hailed as the champion by all the leading spirits among the "conservatives", though both of these great teachers had modified the original Calvinism. Of Dr. Tyler it has been well said that "In forming his system he began not with mind, but with the Bible, and he looked for no advances in theology except such as come from a richer Christian experience". Dr. Tyler founded a theological institute at East Windsor, Conn., in 1834, so long and ably presided over by the cultured Philadelphian, Chester D. Hartranft, D.D., brother of Pennsylvania's soldier and governor.
The monuments of these controversies between "Taylorism" and "Tylerism", now forgotten, are seen in the superb theological seminaries of New Haven and Hartford, but the points of difference, as now discoverable only under the microscope of research, are of no practical importance. Hardly any one except the hair-splitting philosophers can state them. They have been forgotten in the larger vision of advancing Christianity. So will it be with most of the controversies of to-day, especially those centering in the "higher criticism".
It was to Dr. N. W. Taylor, that Mr. Chambers had letters, as well as to Dr. Leonard Bacon, afterwards the famous opponent of slavery, and author, in 1833 of the hymn,
"O God beneath thy guiding hand
Our exiled fathers crossed the sea,
And when they trod the wintry strand